Covid-19 needs to be remembered, not as a new crisis, but as part of a long trajectory of failure to recognise the extraordinary biological precariousness of political and social life.
The gassing of people is considered exceptionally inhumane, officially a categorical “red line” dividing good from evil. This belief now threatens to trigger an escalation with unpredictable consequences.
It is the normalisation of racist liberalism that is the key to what is happening. While many have argued that Wilders is a break from Dutch liberalism, Wilders is actually a continuation by other means.
In 2004, the Israel Defense Forces began using putrid water called “Skunk” to incapacitate Palestinian protestors. But this weapon, though non-lethal, is far more dehumanising than it first appears.
The chloropicrin agent used as a popular pesticide belongs historically to the same family of toxic irritants used in tear gas attacks against refugees.This is not an innocent coincidence.
A disturbing trend in the Netherlands towards more intense forms of racial profiling is converging with increasingly frequent and violent forms of police repression against minorities.
Our gasping for air occurs at a time in which we are suffocated by state-sanctioned violence and the tragedy of development. But the air is a medium which is radically democratic. And if air is freedom, then the breath is its radical calling.
There has been little ambiguity in Hollywood movies over the years as to who the bad guys are. But there has been a paradigm shift in recent years - the threat is now found within our midst. The great Hollywood coercion machine makes it clear that no one is safe as we ourselves have become the ene
The collapse of budget negotiations and the upcoming elections in Holland provide opportunities for the emergence of better answers to the violence done by nationalist antagonisms, imposed through neo-liberal austerity programmes
Who gets the blame for the ongoing social effects of the coalition’s love for neo-liberal principles? The culprits are rather conveniently eastern European migrants, the Greeks, the leftists and of course those that dare to associate themselves with Islam.
